There’s a short anxious scene in the new film “The Hunger Games,” when its 16-year-old heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), races through a deep, dark forest, falls down a hill and rolls and rolls only to rise up and thrust herself again into the unknown. Katniss, the lethally tough linchpin from Suzanne Collins’s trilogy turned rather less imposing film heroine, is a teenage survivalist in a postapocalyptic take on a familiar American myth. When she runs through that forest, and even when she falls, there’s something of the American frontiersman in her, as if she were Natty Bumppo reborn and resexed.
Detractors might more productively spend their time wondering why Collins' vision resonates with its target audience.
Here's what today's young people are looking at: High schools fail to graduate 25 percent of their students. Youth unemployment at a 60 year high. College grads are trying to pay off $1 trillion in debt with jobs on a two-decade run of wage stagnation. Borrow from your folks? They're $700 billion underwater in their mortgages. Of course, you could always enlist, with endless deployment to combat zones. And, oh yeah, if you go out for Skittles some Town Watch numbskull with a loaded weapon might shoot you.
Sorry, baby boom worry-warts, but John Hughes is not going to cut it for these kids.
You can hardly blame YA readers for responding to Collins' vision of a two-tiered society that, for folks on the bottom, has stopped moving forward. In her book, that status quo is maintained by a totalitarian surveillance state that uses the so-called hunger games to provide a gruesome bread-and-circuses spectacle and to show its whip hand to the subjugated.
Combatants are selected by lottery, and "Games" - brought shrewdly to screen by director Gary Ross - begins when a coal-miner's daughter named Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) steps forward to take the place of her drafted younger sister.
It's her first act of self-sacrifice, but by no means her last. She's a heroine of rare moral intelligence, the attribute that makes her such a stand-out character in kid-lit, and doubly so in movies
Detractors might more productively spend their time wondering why Collins' vision resonates with its target audience.
Here's what today's young people are looking at: High schools fail to graduate 25 percent of their students. Youth unemployment at a 60 year high. College grads are trying to pay off $1 trillion in debt with jobs on a two-decade run of wage stagnation. Borrow from your folks? They're $700 billion underwater in their mortgages. Of course, you could always enlist, with endless deployment to combat zones. And, oh yeah, if you go out for Skittles some Town Watch numbskull with a loaded weapon might shoot you.
Sorry, baby boom worry-warts, but John Hughes is not going to cut it for these kids.
You can hardly blame YA readers for responding to Collins' vision of a two-tiered society that, for folks on the bottom, has stopped moving forward. In her book, that status quo is maintained by a totalitarian surveillance state that uses the so-called hunger games to provide a gruesome bread-and-circuses spectacle and to show its whip hand to the subjugated.
Combatants are selected by lottery, and "Games" - brought shrewdly to screen by director Gary Ross - begins when a coal-miner's daughter named Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) steps forward to take the place of her drafted younger sister.
It's her first act of self-sacrifice, but by no means her last. She's a heroine of rare moral intelligence, the attribute that makes her such a stand-out character in kid-lit, and doubly so in movies
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